Why Crowley Doesn't Suck

by Tim Maroney (1997)

I've been reflecting on my contributions to the Thelema list since
coming back from vacation, and I noticed that I seem to come down
pretty hard on Mr. Crowley. I've said many things like this: He was
psychologically naive; his history and politics were uneducated and
facile; he failed to make any contribution to philosophy or even to
grasp it at a baccalaureate level; it would have been a nightmare if
he had achieved secular power; and so on. This may have created a
false impression about my feelings towards the man and his work, and
I thought I might try to explain.

To understand Aleister Crowley's contributions one needs to create
a new category, which I sometimes call "ritual arts." This is a new
category only in that it has not been called out as such; people have
traditionally viewed ritual (by which I include meditation) as either
sacred and beyond mere criteria of artistry, or as socially
functional and to be understood as part of a society. I propose that
we look at it as an art form related to theater. It is in the area of
the stylistic construction of ritual and meditative practices, and as
an explicator of these processes of construction and performance,
that Crowley comes into his own. In fact, his contributions in this
area are unique and deserve to be part of any religious studies
program.

Crowley was a poet, perhaps only of second or lower rank, but a poet by
nature nonetheless, and the grace and beauty of the poetic sentiment
infuses all his rituals and meditations, in contrast with the awkward,
didactic, stentorian or pompous style of many occult rituals.
While one could find much to
criticize in his overall corpus - poems choked with purple,
two-dimensional fictional characters, megalomaniacal essays proposing
ultimate answers to questions he did not understand - there is none
of this in his ritual instructions. Their style is beautifully
sparse, like watermarks on rice paper, with just a gentle touch of
purple and a hint of that which cannot quite be put into words.
The flaccid prose of the Golden Dawn
has been put aside. The result is a genuineness and sincerity of aspiration and
experience which is not only beautiful to read but compelling to
perform.

In poetry derived from ritual and meditative experience,
particularly the sublime Book of Lies and the "Hymn to Pan",
Crowley may sometimes enter the first rank of metaphysical poets. When
he is working from the soul, rather than indulging in the superficial
play-acting so characteristic of occultists, he has no need to tart
up his work. When he lapses into posing the result is awful - the
impenetrable Aha! comes to mind - but our need to exercise
selectivity with respect to Crowley's voluminous output in no way
vitiates the quality of his best work.

Though his solitary rituals are perfect gems, the same cannot be
said of his group rituals. The O.T.O. initiations may be spiritually
efficacious when well performed, but they are not very original,
being patterned closely on Freemasonic rites. The less said about his "Rites
of Eleusis" the better. His most frequently performed group ritual, the
"Gnostic Mass," was derived from Catholic and French Gnostic rituals.
This Mass creates for many the false impression that
it is a mere mockery of the Catholic Mass, while raising troubling
questions about Crowley's ideas on gender. The Priest part is distinctly
paramount in the script, although it may not be in particular
performances. Priest-centricity is not lost on many feminist observers
of the Mass and it discourages some women from pursuing Crowley studies.
However, concerns about originality, anti-Christianity and gender aside,
the power and majesty of the Gnostic Mass and OTO initiation rituals
when "rightly performed with joy & beauty" can hardly be denied.

Crowley's longer writings about ritual and meditation practice, of
which the best examples are Magick in Theory and Practice
(MTP) and Eight Lectures on Yoga, exist in a gray area. The
grayness results from Crowley's unfortunate attempts to delve into
philosophy and his self-aggrandizing accounts of his own spiritual
authority. To consider only MTP, it leads off with an absurd
philosophical claim to have reconciled nihilism, monism and dualism
by simply attributing each to one to the Thelemic trinity of gods.
MTP is riddled with megalomaniacal passages and specious
philosophical observations. Yet when Crowley simply explains how he
thinks rituals work, what feelings he associates with particular
points of ritual, styles appropriate to particular points, and how
the parts integrate into the whole, he presents a comfort with and
knowledge of Western occult modes that would be difficult to find
anywhere else.

I have in the past faulted MTP for parochialism, in that Crowley
seems to take a particular ritual formula as paramount when in fact
there are many other forms of magical ritual, and for exegesis
instead of analysis, since he generally fails to jump to a meta-level
of analysis to engage basic questions, such as why we would want to
do ritual in the first place or why rituals should involve mythic
figures such as gods. For these issues one will have to go to ritual
studies and anthropology. Still, the fact that he fails to contribute
here does not mean that he makes no contribution at all. His account
of his own practice and of his thinking about it is unusually
detailed and beautifully rendered, and deserves general study as a
unique window into practice.

One more of Crowley's strong points deserves mention, again
related to his writing. The Equinox is half mystical
encyclopedia and half literary journal. While its literary
contributions are not stellar, they are usually good, and the playful,
knowing style is still pleasant to read. Mystics and magicians today
are often faced with a great
cultural divide from their spiritual ancestors, and simply to see a
magician being very much a man of the twentieth century is a useful
lesson.

Of course, none of this excuses Crowley's more egregious
personality failings or his dilettante excursions into areas he was
unable to understand, which I will continue to underline as the
opportunity presents itself. In the future, though, I will try to
give equal time to the good and the bad, rather than allowing myself
to be drawn into a reactive mode such as correcting his
followers when they demand that Crowley be showered with unearned
rewards.